Right this moment marks an historic day within the Louder Than Battle calendar as we launch the Louder Than Battle Zine! The primary challenge WAR1 is now in the stores from our web site for simply £4.99 +P&P.
Ryan Lewis-Walker, the zine’s editor explains:
Louder Than Battle, like its dad or mum web site – goals to encapsulate an insatiable, unstoppable really feel for documenting pop cultural components that each design and dictate how we develop as, in a technique or one other – obsessive nerds. ‘Eclectic’ is an usually misused time period, and for now – ‘experimental’ is an overstatement. As we’re virtually sure what occurs to most concepts earlier than they launch and acquire eventual momentum (or disappear in opposition to the ethers of dusty cabinets not touched for many years), throughout the preliminary brainstorming phases earlier than we went to print, rather a lot was talked about relating to the entire vibe of the journal. A lot in order that it was initially conceived as a zine, impressed by one thing such because the Imprecise, Slash or Sniffin’ Glue. Eager to be infused with the works of the Worldwide Occasions or IT, the elemental bible of the countercultural underground that uprooted conservative society from its locational stalemate, the Situationist Occasions, and Digital Sound journal, the seed of the thought, as solely that: an thought, ran round feral, untrained, and amorphous for a number of months.
However finally it took form. Curiosity spiked and declined. Submissions got here and went. Regardless of being impactful and arty-farty – ‘WAR’, as a title, was in all probability not one of the best thought. Regardless of the underground, Louder Than Battle Journal merely couldn’t afford to decompose in between your fingers as skinny items of hempen rag going through a drop of rain. Regardless of the counterculture, this factor needed to resonate. It needed to pop. It needed to belong. It needed to make sense of being messy. It needed to be sensible about being educational. It needed to possess the ballsy vitality of ensnaring consideration with out being determined or distressing. There’s an etiquette to controversy. Stability. Integrity. Silliness. Extra steadiness. It requires legs and a pair of lungs to do this. It requires extra submissions to come back in straight after you’ve completed studying this to do this too.
Whether or not or not our journal has fully ended up as a convergence of the inspirations of favor and iterations of print talked about above is anyone’s guess. And to be trustworthy – it doesn’t even matter. What we now have on our arms is our distinctive, ideological continuation of these blueprints. Its our little contribution to the world of print media, one thing we hardly pine for the return of however are conscious of the worth of when accomplished accurately.
What we now have is a mixture of thought-pieces concerning the scythe-wielding, artist-starving tyrants perched atop Mount Spotify, with a dovetailing of deliciously sardonic opinions about band life on the DIY circuit by post-rock musician Francis Atkinson, Los Angeles artwork rock missile Qween Kwong and ‘sasswave’ group Trend Suggestions that sweeps up nearly everybody and anybody, from promoters to punters of their livid, vitriolic spurt.
Moreover, readers can hope to identify interviews with Gez Varley from LFO about bass music and jeep tradition, a thrillingly bizarre, completely wired story about doll collections, accounts of mental-health melting earlier than our eyes, and the hijacking actions or ‘fragments of testimony’ belonging to rogue youth traversing internationally searching for UK Decay by Discontented Youth writer Ian Trowell, and the occasional flash of a picture to visually manifest the tone pulsating from the center and thru the physique of every web page.
Nonetheless – along with wanting the journal to reflect the location a bit extra, we additionally needed it to be fucking bizarre. This was a relentless thought (amongst a pile of many different problematic concepts – from paper varieties, print finishes and basic subjects of consideration) that stored ebbing and flowing all through the submissions being taken in.
The journal subsequently goals to supply a bodily house inside which a glimpse could be given, for audiences, musicians and inventive individuals the place their pursuits and concepts can have a platform to be recognized. For maybe they’d by no means get an opportunity to be recognized when dominated by the shadows of their day job (work in faculties, life on the street, workplace hours, title your value). These are the dear, sanity-sparing distractions and obsessional tales made public, the whites-of–the-eyes and creaking sounds within the cracks of somebody’s persona, unearthed burials, freaky tales, fringe encounters, experiences of area of interest weirdness and exceptional points of somebody’s historical past, primarily with a musical or creative essence glowing / growling on the core.
That’s how (roughly) it was defined to individuals throughout some final minute poaches for submissions.
Once more – it doesn’t matter.
What issues is that the exhausting half is over. An thought is an summary idea. {A magazine} isn’t any totally different. Till you will have it in your arms, it’s a load of colors and textual content smashed collectively on the web page. What issues is the notion of a entrance door being partially opened for others to come back inside.
What issues is that the web site has one other car for broadcasting its messages. Unanimously interested by masking all of the points of our shapeshifting panorama.
What does matter is the concept we did it. And also you didn’t.
Now we have a small favour to ask. Subscribe to Louder Than Battle and assist maintain the flame of unbiased music burning. Click on the button under to see the extras you get!
